Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Read Online Free PDF Page A

into her bed at night like they crawled into each other’s.
    The girls talked about their bodies. They made growing up into a race. When two nubbins popped out on her chest, Lou’s first response was relief at not having been the last to get them. But once she had breasts she didn’t want them. They grew and became unwieldy. She tore a bandage from a pillowcase and bound her breasts so they didn’t bounce when she ran.
    She was slow to start bleeding. She hated it when she did. The harder and longer she exercised, the less regularly it happened.
    One day a ferocious Irish girl jumped Lou in the washroom and pushed her up against a wall. Lou was stocky and solid, but the Irish girl was twice her size. She had been one of the runners whom Lou outran, early on. Lou fought back, protecting herself, but she was distracted by the muscles squirming inside the arms that pinned her down. When the Irish girl lowered her head and butted Lou in the stomach, a peculiar melting sensation traveled up the length of her thighs, a warmth she hadn’t felt since Robert nearly killed her, on the swing.
    As the two girls grappled, a crowd of students gathered. How strange that Lou could be fighting for her life and still hear what they were saying: Was it true that Sister Francis had a penis? How would Lou know what Sister Francis had beneath her robe? Was this what these girls thought about, in this holy place?
    As she ground her fist into the Irish girl’s eye, the minutes slowed, and the screams of the girls recalled the giggles of Mama’s maids explaining why she couldn’t wear Robert’s trousers. Lou used to enjoy fighting with Robert. It was like catching a fish in your hands, which she’d once seen him do.
    Luckily, it was Sister Francis who broke up the fight. Sister Francis washed the Irish girl’s face and sent her to her bed without supper, then wiped Lou’s eyes with the handkerchief she kept tucked in the sleeve of her scratchy brown robe.
    It was chilly. Late autumn. The corridor smelled of mold and rotting leaves.
    The nun led her down a flight of stairs. She unlocked a door and turned on a lamp, illuminating a large room, bare except for several huge contraptions for extracting confessions under torture: metal racks and leather horses, pulleys and pedals and bars, a rope ladder strung against the wall, iron balls and wooden clubs. Sister Francis smiled like a wolf. Fear sizzled up and down Lou’s spine until she understood what she was seeing.
    From then on, in the afternoons, she ran the track, jumped hurdles, and practiced with the teams. Then she and Sister Francis went down to the makeshift salon de sport and, in the unheated basement gym, built Lou’s strength and endurance. And so began one of the blessed, brief intervals in the life of Lou Villars when she could enjoy the gifts God gave her to compensate for what was denied her, and for what would be dangled in front of her and then cruelly taken away.

Dispatch to the Magyar Gazette
    P ARIS , A UGUST 23, 1925
    A Hero in Chains
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    WITH HIS EYE patch and mane of ermine hair streaked with black, Prince Gyorgi Perenyi carries himself like a true Hungarian hero disguised in the rags of a prisoner of the French state.
    Accused of masterminding a plot to flood the market with counterfeit francs, Perenyi is languishing in a Paris jail. In the worst miscarriage of justice since the Dreyfus affair, the authorities have charged him with trying to destabilize the French economy. But why would a man with the prince’s resources and reputation stoop to such a scheme, even if his fortune has been decimated by the French under the hateful recent treaty that parceled out our homeland?
    The prince insists he has nothing against the French, that his soul has been purified by love for his native land. In an exclusive interview he told this reporter, “When this misunderstanding is resolved, I will return to my castle to see the